First a quick introduction to my situation and setup.
I am an audio/video engineer who currently does a lot of theatre shows in witch I use PowerPoint as my main software for controlling the show.
I have a video rack pc on stage near a high end projector. This allow me to have a direct DVI-D connection to the projector instead of using converter boxes over UTP.
I control the pc with TeamViewer remote desktop from my position in the theatre. On my presenter view I have all my notes and cue’s for the show.
All video I have rendered in HEVC for a somewhat decent file size while preserving maximum quality.
I have office 2016 & Windows 10, my rack video PC has an Athlon 880K (will be upgraded soon), 16gb ram and a gtx 1050TI for the hardware accelerated playback of HEVC.
My workstation at home where I make the shows has a intel i7-4960X with 16gb ram and a Titan X.

My Questions:
How exactly goes the rendering process, my understanding is that PowerPoint does not render natively to the used resolution but to an fixed resolution and after scales that product according to the size of the display. This fixed resolution size can also be given a pixel value with 1080px for Height for example. (done in the slide size)

Does PowerPoint use windows media player as the default for video rendering and how can I have more insight in the behind the scene workings?
Example, 2 with different resolution video’s are playing in a slide that has a different resolution, what scaling filters are used? Can I modify this to my preferred method
Is it possible to have the rendering done with an alternative media player so I can have more control over the process?

I have multiple video’s rendered in different layers and effects in some scenes, I understand that this costs a lot of computational power but I feel as if PowerPoint taxes the system more than should be necessary.
Also some renders don’t play smooth in media player/PowerPoint, while in other 3th party player experience no problem.

I am also interested in inserting custom shader/rendering filters in the process and have more fine tuned control over the hardware acceleration functions and options, but with the current situation I don’t see a possibility for that.
I have tried with external LAV/direct show filters but none give me the desired result in quality and performance when comparing it to other 3th party players.


Technical quality is my first biggest priority.

Thank you for you’re time and hope that someone can give me some more insight in the workings of video rendering in PowerPoint